New Adventures and Big Finish

Between 1991 and 1997 Virgin Books produced the New Adventures, which
were unabashedly not trying to be children's stories any more (some of
the early ones have a distinct "ma's out, pa's out, let's talk dirt"
feeling to them). In 1997 the BBC took back the book rights (though
Virgin produced more books without the BBC characters), and produced
its own series of Eighth Doctor Adventures and Past Doctor Adventures;
it kept going until 2006.

Starting in 1999 Big Finish Productions released audio plays,
originally on compact disc, with characters from the series voiced by
their original actors (and increasingly new characters and new
actors). Again, these weren't trying to be for kids.

I didn't read/listen to these at the time, and I gather quality is
pretty variable even if you favour the dark/significant last couple of
TV series that influenced them, so while I may write the occasional
review I don't expect to attempt any sort of comprehensive survey. To
me Doctor Who is basically a thing that exists on television. Even
so, many of the writers here ended up working on the revived series.

Dimensions in Time (1993)

John Nathan-Turner's final production, in which he got to do things
all his own way for the thirtieth anniversary special. For fans who
had been hoping for a revival of the series, this was a slap in the
face.

The 3D production technique used here relied on the
Pulfrich effect,
which requires constant movement in the visual field to generate the
illusion of depth; even if the writers had wanted to make a serious
Who story, they'd have needed to keep everything moving. (And this
was in any case meant from the start to be a one-off piece to raise
money for charity. Though so was The Five Doctors, and that had an
actual story.)

So what's left is a bit of a rogue's gallery, often literally, as
someone clearly had a good rootle through the BBC's props warehouse
and dragged out anything that could be stuck in a window and have
"rar" noises dubbed over it (and in fact a lot of them are fan-made
costumes). No Daleks, because Terry Nation wouldn't play, and most of
the companions only show up in a single shot. It's very reminiscent of
The Five Doctors, in fact, in that it's mostly meaningless if you
don't have memories of and associations with the Doctors, companions
and monsters who are thrown briefly onto the screen here.

Rather oddly, it's the recent companions who look most different:
Pertwee's, Davison's and Baker's Doctors, and Liz Shaw, Mel and Sarah
Jane, all look pretty much as they did. Susan is obviously older but
still clearly Susan. But Peri has changed quite a bit, and Nyssa is
barely recognisable. (Romana 2 has aged rather better.) And oh, dear,
what they did to Leela! Still, Louise Jameson did refuse to wear the
original costume.

Like the records and the various unofficial parodies, this is a
celebration of the idea of Doctor Who more than of the programme
itself. So really they had to get Tom Baker back, if only very
briefly and not really fitting in the story. In the end, this is
entirely dispensable; if you insist, make it the version with
production notes.

The TV Movie (1996)

This had a long and troubled production history, with various
companies trying to buy the television rights and the BBC usually
havering. The 1994 series would have been a reboot, for which the
series bible

introduced the Doctor and the Master, who were half-brothers and
both sons of the lost Time Lord explorer Ulysses, Barusa's son. When
the evil Master became President of the Time Lords upon Barusa's
death, the Doctor fled Gallifrey in a rickety old TARDIS to find
Ulysses. Barusa's spirit became enmeshed in the TARDIS, enabling him
to advise his grandson. The Doctor took the TARDIS to "the Blue
Planet" -- Earth, his mother's native world -- to search for
Ulysses.

Yes, well. Ultimately this episode ended up as a backdoor pilot, to be
broadcast as a one-shot, which would go to series if it attracted
enough viewers.

Even more than some of the late stories of the main series, this feels
like a story put together by fans who want more of the cool stuff and
less of the connective tissue that allows the cool stuff to make
sense. How long was it after the start before Time Lords and Gallifrey
were mentioned? But no, right here in the pilot we've got the Eye of
Harmony, local time travel, and a threat to destroy the entire
universe.

It's a very steampunk TARDIS, all of a sudden, with a bigger console
room than had ever been possible before (even more of it was built but
not used), and floor-to-ceiling pillars which would be echoed in the
new series; at the same time it's an obvious echo of the series 14
wood-panelled "emergency control room". It really ought to appeal to
me more than it does.

Then we're dropped into a random gang fight in Chinatown, that seems
to exist mostly to produce a dramatic entrance for the Doctor, and his
most bathetic reason for regeneration ever. (Not counting six to
seven, which didn't have a reason at all.) And of course "you don't
shock a flatline", which was a cliché even in 1996.

Grace would work better if she weren't so thoroughly becleavaged in
her opening scenes; the hawt babe-ness of the companion should always
be incidental, I think, or it seems forced. She's also got a bit of
the Gillian Anderson as Dana Scully thing going in her mannerisms,
which makes her seem (to me at least) too familiar too quickly – and
her reversal from disbelief to belief is entirely driven by the plot
rather than her character. Still, Ashbrook does a decent job with a
fairly half-arsed role.

There's a lot of visual grammar from Terminator 2 here, in the
entrance of the TARDIS, the CGI slime-snake-Master, and the way
Bruce-the-Master dresses himself and acts. But it feels as though it's
done by a heavy-handed amateur, as with the intercuts between
Frankenstein and the Doctor's regeneration, or between the Doctor's
looking for clothes and Chang Lee going through his possessions; or
the smashed-up rainy hospital wing for the big dramatic "who am I"
sequence. (Geoffrey Sax had actually been directing for nearly twenty
years.)

(How did the Master get into the TARDIS the first time? He didn't
have the key.)

Of course at the time my main objection was to the "half-human" thing
(which never actually affects the plot) and the whole business with
the Eye of Harmony. These days I wonder why any old human eye is
able to open the Eye. I didn't have as much trouble with the sexual
tension with Grace to which many fans objected, but I should have
known better considering what it led to in the revived series. Really,
one should be amazed at how closely this manages to stick to original
continuity, rather than objecting to how it varies. But then, this is
in spirit another fan production that needs to sight-check a sonic
screwdriver, jelly babies, and so on, without ever really
understanding why they're there; they're just used as a way to please
the fans who will recognise them. The resurrection of Grace and Chang
Lee is the capstone to all this: because if that could be done for
them, why not for all the other people who've died either in this one
programme or in the show's entire history?

For me the narrative problem with the bike/ambulance chase isn't so
much that it's a road chase (ahem, Day of the Daleks and Planet of
the Spiders), it's that it's a road chase that's entirely
conventional, that could fit in any old TV series or film with a big
enough budget (particularly Terminator 2 again). Similarly,
comic-relief Pete the pudgy morgue guy, and even more so Professor
Wagg, are utterly generic stock characters, a sign of lazy
script-writing. (So's the scrappy kid sidekick, I think.) Having the
Doctor discovering himself is perhaps not bad as a way of giving new
viewers some idea of what's going on, but having him not know for
basically the first half of the show means it's all a bit aimless, not
to mention cutting down on McGann's time establishing himself in the
role.

Unfortunately the programme was broadcast in the USA during May
sweeps, when the competition is fiercest, and ended up with audience
figures well below what would be needed for a series (having almost no
promotion didn't help). Fox decided to go with season three of
Sliders rather than this, and I can't say they were wrong to do so;
in the end this is just the same bland mediocre sci-fi TV that
Sliders mostly was, only much more expensive to produce.

Numbers were better in the UK, but without an American production
partner the BBC had no interest in putting up all the money for a
new series.

I can't really think of Grace as a companion; if I did I'd have to
count Chang Lee too. In that case I'd probably put her between Jamie
and Nyssa, and Chang Lee between Katarina and Kamelion (in spite of
his best efforts he's not as annoying as Adric).

The Curse of Fatal Death (1999)

Holy crap.
This is the bridge.
This is where Steven Moffatt laid out everything he was going to do if
he got to play with the show for real, and everyone said "har har,
breasts, snogging, vibrator". (Though after Dimensions in Time and
the TV Movie I can see why it was viewed a bit more favourably than if
one came to it cold.)

There's the casual reference to forgotten details in order to let the
old fans feel as though they've been catered for. (The planet Tersurus
from The Deadly Assassin). There's the endless parade of sex and
bodily function jokes, and companion romance. There's the speech about
how amazing and wonderful the Doctor is. There's endless doubletalk
about time travel. And most of all, massed emotion trumps any sort of
consistency or script logic.

In fact if you blend this with Survival you pretty much end up with
the template for new Who, particularly Moffat-era Who, just as my
watching of old Who has come to an end.

All three of these "extra" episodes, all by different hands, to my
mind show up the problem with having fans working on the show: they
lose sight of the distinction between "flaws are inevitable, so we
accept them, cover them as best we can, and move on" (as the original
production team would have done) and "flaws are an intrinsic part of
the fun and need to be emphasised" (which puts off people who aren't
dedicated fans in a way that mere technical failures can't).

The eternal error of the dedicated fan is to fill in every blank space
and remove room for speculation.

Final thoughts

Wow.

I'm writing this on the evening of 25 December 2015. I don't remember
exactly when, or why, I decided to start this re-watch; I know I wrote
my first series recap in December 2011. That was the year of the Arab
Spring and the Occupy movement, when Amy Winehouse and Kim Jong-Il
died.

It was also the year Lis Sladen died, but I don't think that's
what kicked me off. It might have been related to my increasing
disenchantment with new Who; I'd been plugging along for a while,
but I found Matt Smith quite literally unpleasant to watch and
basically stopped at that point.

My memories of the show before I started this were roughly of series
14 to 21 and hazy bits later on, though as a child I devoured the
Target novelisations and had a good idea of the content of stories I'd
never actually seen. (The pictures in my head were much better than
the real thing, but that's always the way.) There haven't, therefore,
been many narrative surprises as I went through this lot except for
some of the later stories that I had entirely forgotten, and I was
able to concentrate on the performances and how well the plot was
conveyed by what was actually broadcast, rather than what was laid out
at greater length in the book.

The great thing about doing this re-watch has been the ability to see
the stories in context, such as the ebbs and flows of whether they
were mostly set on contemporary Earth or mostly on alien worlds, and
whether the companion role was filled by single or multiple people.
Pick a story at random and you can't say whether a particular thing
was standard at the time or being done differently to make a point,
and I certainly found I appreciated stories I'd previously seen in
isolation, such as The Krotons or Carnival of Monsters, more when
I saw what came before and afterwards.

I've enjoyed McCoy's stories more this time than I did last, and I've
particularly liked the rediscovery of Troughton (what's left of his
episodes). I haven't undergone any major revisions of feeling; I still
have little time for Davison or Colin Baker, but Ace has climbed up my
companion ranking and I'm amazed in retrospect that Zoe and Barbara
ended up on the top spots.

There have been times when I thought about dropping it, but they were
all after Tom Baker had left, and by then I'd covered the majority of
the material anyway.

I would recommend this experience to any Who enthusiast; it's left
me with a much greater appreciation for the limits of budget and
technical capability, and in spite of everything an abiding love for
what the show can do when things come together.

And that's it. Maybe the occasional Big Finish or New Adventure, but
for the show itself: I'm done.

Thank you for doing that. I won't buy you a beer to encourage you to talk about NuWho but I might in thanks for having gone all the way through the old.

Yeah, there is a lot of proto-NuWho in The Curse of Fatal Death. I don't mind all of it but 'Oh, Doctor you are the most wonderful person in the cosmos' gets up my nose now. Say it once, I can take it as a tribute to a much loved series. Include it in the re-make... Tcha!

The new writer has whaffled on about how Yoooge a fan he is. Perhaps that is now the Obligatory Thing To Say.

Owen - those are youtube links, so you can watch the other two yourself if you want to.

Michael - I feel that the "Most Wonderful Person Ever" speech is something you can get away with once. If that.

The new writer came up with Countrycide, Cyberwoman and 42. I don't hold out much hope, and I think it's a great shame that an actor as competent as Capaldi should have had such a lousy showrunner.

It would seem pretty strange if the new writer said "I never really liked the show as a kid, but it's a job and I'm going to do my best at it" - even though that's exactly the attitude I'd like to see. Or even "it's had good and bad patches, and it's reinvented itself every time a new team came in, and I'm going to carry on that tradition".

I'm not sure how good the new showrunner is as a writer is particularly relevant. Moffat wrote some of the better early nuwho episodes, but has been a considerably poorer showrunner. So the two skills aren't entirely correlated in my mind.

The amount which the showrunner writes, while also running the show, is also a factor. In the latter days of the old series, the script editor could get away with one story out of six or so as well as uncredited polishing jobs on some of the others, and the producer generally wasn't a writer at all. Now there's one person doing both jobs (plus an executive producer or two, but it's not clear how much involvement they have), and writing or co-writing around half the scripts. It's not surprising if the whole thing falls apart a bit.

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